The peri­od between Pesach and Shavuot was one of seri­ous ten­sion in ancient Israel. The bar­ley har­vest began at Pesach and the wheat har­vest end­ed near the time of Shavuot. More was at stake dur­ing the peri­od of the count­ing of the Omer than our spir­i­tu­al growth. The future year’s wealth, […]

Ear­ly in our stud­ies at rab­binic school, one of our class­es intend­ed to make us bet­ter pub­lic speak­ers. Our instruc­tor was Hol­ly­wood actor Stan­ley Wax­man. He would often assign us the task of speak­ing extem­po­ra­ne­ous­ly for three min­utes on any sub­ject he would present (usu­al­ly offer­ing one word). […]

I have been “on” (or using) Twit­ter since Jan­u­ary 2009. I don’t use it much social­ly, but rather edu­ca­tion­al­ly and polit­i­cal­ly. I don’t share where I am, how I’m feel­ing and what I’m eat­ing. I share thoughts about #Torah, #Israel, #Pales­tine, #Gaza, #Iran, #Auschwitz, #Shoa, #Holo­caust, #Jew­ish, #Exo­dus, #Sukkot, #Rab­bi, […]

I began creating a Web site in my head as early as August 1995 when I drafted the following

For a project I’m pursuing regarding Jewish involvement on the internet and the World Wide Web in particular, I’m interested in learning about any sites about which you may know. For example, do any rabbis have Home pages? Which synagogues or synagogue organizations have Web sites? Does Marge Piercy have a site at which you can read portions of "He She and It"? Does Howard Rheingold have a site where you can learn more about creating a Virtual [Jewish] Community? Is there a Web Camera at the Kotel? In the Wilderness of Zin?

¡warning!

This site remains under considerable reconstruction.

Most pages should still be available in their original location. However, I will be moving the vast majority of the old site (static html pages) into the Web 2.0 (blog) site. If you experience any "link rot", please let me know.

When I initially created this site I organized the material into what seemed to be meaningful categories (in the days before "tags"). But the time came when, it was hard to figure out which link to click if you wanted to know about Sammy Levinger's ("who"?) death ("what"?) while fighting during the Spanish Civil War ("when"?), though we had visited Belchite the site ("where?") of the battle where he sustained his mortal wounds. The new tools should make this process easier.

`//rite on!
,\\ark Hurvitz

Producing content on the Web since 1995.

some sayings of ר‘משבצונה“ל

For many years I have worked hard, and struggled with mastering virtuous. Now, in addition, I’m working on becoming more virtual.This is an expression of that effort.
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All photographs are by Mark Hurvitz unless they are obviously not (or credit otherwise is given).

The photos in the banner at the top (only a shallow sliver of a much larger photo) are either from our home or our travels and are offered for their beauty alone (though a brain-teaser for me: "Where was that?").